This disclosure generally relates to online content distribution, and more specifically to providing a preview of a content item composed of individual components to a content provider.
Content providers produce content that is targeted to certain audiences within online systems. Users interact with content received from the online system. With the advent of online systems such as social networking systems, content providers have increasingly relied on the online systems to create effective sponsored content within the online system to greatly increase engagement among users of the online systems. For example, subsequent to presenting sponsored content provided by a content provider to users of an online system, the online system tracks how often the users interact with the presented content and calculates statistics for the content. These statistics may be accrued over numerous content campaigns and serve to measure the effectiveness of each content item in the campaign. Based on these statistics, the content provider can edit content items that perform poorly or alternatively choose to show content items that have performed very effectively.
Currently, content providers face challenges in running content campaigns at scale on an online system such as setting up content campaigns such that the best possible content item is created and delivered to each user of the online system. For example, current solutions only enable a content provider to present pre-assembled content items to users of an online system. Online systems can track the performance of pre-assembled content items but provide zero or very little feedback to content providers about the performance of particular components (e.g., text, images and videos) of a content item. Content providers cannot “see inside a content item” to understand which components of the content item did not perform well for their objectives or target audience.